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FSTA-DECODE

Section: Linux System Administrator's Manual (8)
Updated: May 2006
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NAME

fsta-decode - run a command with fsta-encoded arguments

SYNOPSIS

fsta-decode COMMAND [ARGUMENT ...]

DESCRIPTION

fsta-decode decodes escapes (such as newline characters and other whitespace) in the specified ARGUMENTs and uses them to run COMMAND. The argument escaping uses the same rules as path escaping in /etc/fstab, /etc/mtab and /proc/mtab.

In essence fsta-decode can be used anytime we want to pass multiple parameters to a command as a list of command line arguments. It turns output like this:

/root
/mnt/remot-disk
/home

Into one long list of parameters, "/root /mnt/remot-disk /home". This can be useful when trying to work with multiple filesystems at once. For instance, we can use it to unmount multiple NFS shares. This program also removes whitespace and other characters which might cause programs such as mount(8) or umount(8) to fail.

EXIT STATUS

fsta-decode exits with status 127 if COMMAND can't be run. Otherwise it exits with the status returned by COMMAND.

EXAMPLES

The following example reads fstab, finds all instances of VFAT filesystems and prints their mount points (argument 2 in the fstab file). fsta-decode then runs the specified program, umount(8), and passes it the list of VFAT mountpoints. This unmounts all VFAT partitions.

fsta-decode umount $(awk [aq]$3 == [dq]vfat[dq] { print $2 }[aq] /etc/fstab)